Dear Murphy for PENROSE PALACE

AUGUST 2025

An illustration, made into two cards, commissioned by my client for their partner, PENROSE PALACE. The characters pictured are Murphy (left, orange) and Yumeko (right, cyan) from PENROSE PALACE's project called Dear Murphy: a series of worldbuilding designs and illustrations, combined with electronic video game music production.

This request was a surprise for PENROSE PALACE's birthday, so my client provided me with character references and personality details. I used Figma to board references and other inspirations, particularly drawing ideas from the colours and shape language of Art Nouveau. After denoting a direction, I got to sketching and we were stuck on two concepts. I ended up combining these together and continued from there. When incorporating the shape language of Art Nouveau, I employed the use of many overlapping circles, creating a sense of movement. I also took a lot of inspiration from the concept and lighting of this scene from Revolutionary Girl Utena.

When the time came to deliver to my client, there were two steps: delivering the digital image, and then physically delivering two cards. We came up with this concept due to an off-hand comment that PENROSE PALACE had made about wanting to create trading cards for their characters.

In the end, both my client and their partner were very pleased, and they stated "My style being so stylized, I figured would make it hard for the more realistic styles but you did a fantastic job!"